Paganini on 180g Vinyl – Where Is the Outrage?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paganini Available Now

Years ago we managed to get hold of the Heavy Vinyl pressing put out by Fenn Music in Germany, about which a well known record dealer on the web (you may recognize the style) had this to say:

“Stunning Reissue Of EMI ASD 440 Recorded In Stereo In 1961. This Recording Featuring The Royal Philharmonic Conducted By Alberto Erede Provides Convincing Proof, If Any Were Needed, That Menuhin Was One Of The Great Violinists Of The 20th Century.”

The “convincing proof” provided by this record is that those responsible for it are Rank Incompetents of the Worst Kind (see what I did there?).

Screechy, bright, shrill, thin and harsh, it’s hard to imagine worse sound than this piece of Heavy Vinyl trash delivers.

Had I paid good money to buy this pressing from 2004 in the hopes of hearing the supremely talented Yehudi Menuhin of 1961 tear it up on Paganini’s legendary first two concertos, I can tell you one thing: I would be pissed.

Where is the outrage in the audiophile community over this kind of trash?

I have yet to see it. I suspect I will grow quite a bit older and quite a bit grayer before anyone from the audiophile commentariat notices just how bad this record sounds. I hope I’m proven wrong.

Screechy, bright, shrill, thin and harsh, it’s hard to imagine worse sound from this piece of Heavy Vinyl garbage.

No warmth.

No sweetness.

No richness.

No Tubey Magic.

In other words, no trace of the original’s (or the early reissue’s) analog sound. At most I may own one or two classical CDs that sound this bad, and I own quite a few. When audiophiles of an analog bent tell you they don’t like the sound of CDs, this is why they don’t like them: they sound like this junky Heavy Vinyl record.

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Cheap Trick – Dream Police

More of the Music of Cheap Trick

  • Boasting two STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this copy is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Dream Police you’ve heard
  • This copy was doing everything right — there was nothing close to it in our shootout, so if you can put up with some surface noise, you are going to be to hear this album sound better than you ever imagined
  • Forget whatever dead-as-a-doornail Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days – if you want to hear the Tubey Magic, size and energy of this wonderful album, a vintage pressing like this one is the way to go
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock records, but once you hear just how incredible sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and pops and just be swept away by the music
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Underneath the gloss, there are a number of songs that rank among Cheap Trick’s finest, particularly the paranoid title track… it would later feel like one of the group’s last high-water marks.”

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Art Pepper – Thursday Night at the Village Vanguard

More of the Music of Art Pepper

  • This original 1979 Contemporary pressing boasts a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two
  • The sound was bigger, richer and livelier than practically all others we played – above all it’s balanced, avoiding many of the problems we heard on other pressings
  • If anyone can capture the realism of a live jazz club, it’s the engineers and producers at Contemporary, in this case Bob Simpson and Lester Koening
  • The first of four volumes that make up the Art Pepper Village Vanguard set, recorded live over a three-night period in New York in July 1977
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The great altoist soars on lengthy versions of ‘Valse Triste’ (in a particularly passionate take) and ‘Goodbye.’ In addition to Pepper, his trio – pianist George Cables, bassist George Mraz, and drummer Elvin Jones – is also in top form, and the music is consistently stimulating and emotional.”

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Chet Atkins and Les Paul – Chester & Lester

More of the Music of Chet Atkins

  • Chester & Lester makes its Hot Stamper debut with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides of this vintage RCA pressing
  • Huge, rich, present, with an abundance of energy and great depth and room around the guitars — it’s all here
  • The notes for this copy rave about the sound — apparently, this live in the studio recording from 1975 has the sound that RCA and Chet Atkins were famous for back in the 50s and 60s. Who knew?
  • Chester & Lester won the Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance in 1976
  • Les Paul’s recordings from back in the day can be off the charts Tubey Magical, but the music is rarely compelling, so we don’t do shootouts for his records anymore, but you can be sure this wonderful sounding title will be a regular on the site from now on
  • 4 stars: “After eight years away from the microphones, Les Paul joined forces with country music’s Chet Atkins in a marvelously relaxed, tasty session of cross-cultural jamming. You won’t have any problem telling Chester and Lester apart on these tracks; Les’ bright, almost metallic sound and twirling, yet now more economical flurries are a world away from Chet’s mellow fingerpicking, lightly tarted with echo. Yet the two styles play brilliantly off each other….”

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Letter of the Week – John Wesley Harding Has Playback Issues

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing of John Wesley Harding he purchased a while back:

Hey Tom,   

So many great records in this batch, but some solid misses too — details coming. John Wesley Harding for example sounds great but has some serious distortion through much of side two; a bit ’too vintage’, in spite of the sound it seems once to have had.

Dear Sir,

Definitely check your front end setup on this one, there is no actual distortion on the record, just sound that may be hard to reproduce.

My advice would be to make sure you have replaced your cartridge recently.

Carts that get old have a problem with records like these. We know, we replace our cartridge every three months when hard-to-play records start to sound strained or congested and gritty.

The sheen of massed strings, a sound critical to the orchestral recordings we play, are impossible to reproduce correctly with an older-than-it-should-be unit. A fresh cartridge can make all the difference in the sound of  difficult to reproduce records.

Keeping a cartridge installed for too long is a mistake made by 100% of the audiophiles I have ever known.

The other explanation could be that our microfine tip is playing deeper in the groove and missing whatever damage is encoded above it, damage which may have been caused by the older cartridges of the day that were used to play the record by the previous owner or owners. We can’t say it doesn’t happen.

We can say that if you bring this record back, the next person to buy it has a roughly 98% chance of keeping it. Maybe one out of five hundred or so ever come back a second time. At least that’s how it has worked out over the last twenty-five years.

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Sibelius / Violin Concerto / Ricci

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jean Sibelius Available Now

This is a wonderful sounding London Stereo Treasury pressing featuring one of our favorite violinists, Ruggiero Ricci, performing the Sibelius Violin Concerto in D Minor.

The tone of the violin on side one is just right — every nuance of Ricci’s bowing can clearly be heard.

While the violin sounds amazing on side one, the orchestra lacks a bit of weight.

This side is also not quite as Tubey Magical as it could be. In our opinion, however, the violin tone and the incredible dynamics are more than enough to make us want to award this record a fairly high grade.

Side two actually has a bit more fullness, but this also seems to rob the violin of some of its presence. 

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With the Right VTF the Record Comes to Life

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

With the RIGHT VTF the Record COMES to LIFE

Robert writes:

The other day I checked the VTF, yet again, and my scale showed it was set at 1.807. I adjusted it to 1.800 and went back to playing records. Was it now actually at 1.800? Impossible to really know for sure.

But it did seem, if 1.800 is the indeed the magic number, that I’d finally hit it.

I was playing Miles Davis Friday Night At The Blackhawk, an extremely well recorded live album. My copy had generally sounded excellent. On this occasion, the record sounded . . . imagine this, exactly like a live performance.

Of course there was some occasional surface noise and, of course, I wasn’t actually listening to a live performance. It was a record after all.

But never before that moment had a record convinced me so completely I was hearing something I wasn’t. Somehow one tiny little change had managed to strip away just enough of the remaining artifice to lift the experience of hearing a record from very live sounding to uncannily real.

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Letter of the Week – Finding a Way Out of the Heavy Vinyl Trap

Letters Comparing Hot Stamper Pressings to their Heavy Vinyl Counterparts

One of our good overseas customers had this to say about the records he was purchasing before he found out about the superiority of our Hot Stamper pressings:

Hey Tom, 

I am of the opinion not that Heavy Vinyl is the problem, it is how the music is treated [processed] until it is pressed on the Heavy Vinyl. In any case, Heavy Vinyl is a crime against the environment. It is pure marketing.

But less than a year ago I was in the same trap. Unfortunately I need to admit that.

Dear Sir,

Glad to see you have taken Step One, which is recognizing and admitting you made a mistake when you bought all those rarely-better-than-mediocre Heavy Vinyl reissues.

You believed the reviewers and the forum posters and found out the hard way that none of those folks can be trusted to know what they are talking about.

The next steps are even easier.

Stop believing these people, buying the records they recommend, and take all the money you were wasting on that crap and buy yourself some amazing sounding Hot Stampers with it.

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The Who – Who By Numbers

More of the Music of The Who

  • Who By Numbers returns to the site for only the second time in over three years, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides of this vintage Polydor import pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Glyn Johns‘s magic is on display here, with open mics in a big studio space creating the 3D soundscapes we love
  • Features two of their most iconic songs, “Slip Kid” and “Squeezebox,” and both sound incredible on this copy
  • 4 stars – Rolling Stone raves: “They may have made their greatest album in the face of [their personal problems]. But only time will tell.”
  • These are the stampers that always win our shootouts, and when you hear them you will know why – the sound is big, rich and clear like no other
  • We’ve discovered a number of titles in which one stamper always wins, and here are some others
  • If you’re a Who fan, this title from 1975 is surely a Must Own.

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Hey Speakers Corner, What The Hell Were You Thinking?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Great Albums from 1968 Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We rarely have either of the first two B,S&T albums in stock, sorry.

The second album is almost impossible to find these days. Our last shootout was in 2024 and it could be years before we get another one going.

Child Is Father to the Man on Speakers Corner is an audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty, with reviews for more than 300 on this very blog).

When this pressing of Child Is Father to the Man came out back in 2007, we auditioned one and were dumbfounded at the dismal quality of the sound. We noted:

This is the worst sounding Heavy Vinyl Reissue LP I have heard in longer than I can remember.

To make a record sound this bad you have to work at it. What the hell were they thinking?

Any audiophile record dealer that would sell you this record should be run out of town on a rail.

Of course that would never have happened, and will never happen, because every last one of them (present company excluded) will carry it, of that you can be sure.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, out comes a record like this to prove that no matter how negative you are about the quality of audiophile record production these days, things can always get worse, and they have.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

Actually it would, now that I come to think about it. The Gold CD Cisco put out in 2012 was every bit as awful.

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